San Francisco - The company that makes Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, a counterculture staple, sued many of its personal care competitors Monday over the validity of their organic labels as the once-quiet "green" cosmetic sector has soared in popularity, luring several Wall Street corporations into the field.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, accused 10 companies and two industry groups of selling and promoting soaps, lotions and other products that are manufactured using conventionally grown crops or chemicals derived from petroleum.
Measles outbreaks in at least seven states are expected to produce more cases in 2008 than in any other recent year, federal health officials said Thursday, warning that measles is highly contagious and can cause severe illness and even death.
|
| ©New York Times
|
Several strains of mycoplasma have been "engineered" to become more dangerous. They are now being blamed for AIDS, cancer, CFS, MS, CJD and other neurosystemic diseases.
Beijing - A deadly virus has spread rapidly in eastern China, killing at least 21 children and infecting nearly 3,000, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.
Enterovirus 71 began spreading in Fuyang in the eastern province of Anhui in early March but authorities only reported it publicly on Sunday, saying there had been 789 cases.
By Thursday, the number had risen to 2,946, Xinhua said.
Matthew Price
BBC NewsThu, 01 May 2008 22:10 UTC
I think that within ten years that we will have strategies that will re-grow the bones, and promote the growth of functional tissue around those bones.
Dr Dr Stephen Badylak
University of Pittsburgh
Dermot Doherty
BloombergThu, 01 May 2008 22:05 UTC
Four decades after the Grateful Dead and Timothy Leary made acid trips a counter-cultural rite of passage, Rick Doblin is trying to shake the drug's hippie image and reclaim its use as a medicine.
Doblin, who leads a group sponsoring the first study of LSD as a therapy in 36 years, says the new Swiss research may show the drug helps ease anxiety and pain in patients suffering from illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.
Comment: "We need to adopt a dispassionate and evidence-based approach" - what a fine and novel idea. One that is sorely lacking in modern science where political agendas and a host of dogmas rule the roost.
More than half of U.S. hospitals are "teetering on the brink of insolvency" or have become insolvent because they do not treat an adequate number of patients to provide sufficient revenue, according to a study recently released by Alvarez & Marsal, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The electromagnetic fields produced by incubators alter newborns' heart rates, reveals a small study published ahead of print in the Fetal and Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood. It is not clear what the long term effects might be, but this could have implications for babies born prematurely, who may spend several weeks or months in incubators, say the authors.
The research team assessed the variability in the heart rate of 43 newborn babies, none of whom was critically ill or premature.
The heart rates of 27 of these babies were assessed over three periods of five minutes each, during which the incubator motor was left running, then switched off, then left running again. To see if noise might be a factor, because incubators are noisy, 16 newborns were exposed to "background noise," by placing a tape beside the baby's head, while the incubator motor was switched off.
Lower rates of asthma are found in children who live on tree-lined streets, according to an article released on May 1, 2008 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a BMJ Specialist journal.
Chemicals used to make nonstick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics are spreading around the world and turning up in surprising places, everywhere from wildlife and drinking water supplies to human blood. Now, a team of researchers including Kathleen Arcaro of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found these suspected carcinogens in samples of human milk from nursing mothers in Massachusetts.
"Perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, are found in human blood around the world, including the blood of newborns, but this is the first study in the United States to document their occurrence in human milk," says Arcaro, a professor in the department of veterinary and animal sciences and a member of the environmental sciences program. "While nursing does not expose infants to a dose that exceeds recommended limits, breast milk should be considered as an additional source of PFCs when determining a child's total exposure."
Comment: "We need to adopt a dispassionate and evidence-based approach" - what a fine and novel idea. One that is sorely lacking in modern science where political agendas and a host of dogmas rule the roost.